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'For me, England is a mythical place'

This article is more than 19 years old
Born in Nagasaki, Kazuo Ishiguro arrived in the UK at the age of five and, he tells Tim Adams, always expected to go home. Still here, he has set his oppressive and brilliant new novel against the backdrop of a uniquely weird English boarding school

From his semi-detached house in suburban Golders Green, in north London, Kazuo Ishiguro has made himself an architect of singular, self-enclosed worlds. His writing traps us inside strange skulls. He spends, he says, around five years on each of his books and the first couple of these years, each time, involves little circumnavigations of the imaginative space of his novel, marking boundaries, testing structures, making himself at home. All of his quietly unsettling, intimate vantages have foundations in the voices that narrate them and he spends a good deal of time, too, 'auditioning' these voices, listening to different possibilities, before he settles on one.

The voice of his new, oppressively brilliant novel, Never Let Me Go, is that of Kathy H, who at 31 is looking back on her curious English boarding-school days at a place called Hailsham. Kathy's world seems so logical and mundane, the surface of her language so steady and familiar, that it takes the reader a little time to discover the disturbing facts of the lives she describes. The first clue comes in her use of simple little euphemisms: she is a 'carer', these days, she explains, she looks after 'donors' before they 'complete'; she remains in thrall to the 'guardians' who taught her at school.

The full implications of these charged little power relations emerge from her account very slowly. It is, hopefully, not giving away too much of Ishiguro's meticulous dystopia to say that Kathy and all the rest of the children who were at Hailsham are clones and that their macabre stories expand, in a way Kafka would have recognised, to become a metaphor for all of our lives.

Kathy herself first surfaced in Ishiguro's notes almost 15 years ago when he had a sense of a book about a group of young people with a Seventies atmosphere. 'They hung around and argued about books,' he says. 'I knew there was this strange fate hanging over them, but I couldn't work out exactly what it was.' He used to tell his wife Lorna he was writing a campus novel and she was suitably horrified by the idea. It was only relatively recently, when he was listening on the radio to various programmes about biotechnology, that the particular fate of his sketchy students became clear to him.

Ishiguro is very good at seeing the sinister and chaotic where most of us, including his narrators, might kid ourselves we see normality. In The Remains of the Day he toyed wickedly with English preconceptions about the lives of country houses. Hailsham is an extension of that vision. He did not go to boarding school and his only real knowledge of it comes from the bedtimes when he used to read Enid Blyton aloud to his daughter, Naomi, who is now 13, but he knows exactly what he is on to.

'Hailsham is like a physical manifestation of what we have to do to all children,' he says. 'It is a protected world. To some extent at least you have to shield children from what you know and drip-feed information to them. Sometimes that is kindly meant, and sometimes not.

'When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it. All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.'

Given the world his own parents knew, Ishiguro himself had to be deceived more than most. It is tempting to read a lot of his sense of the randomness of fate into the simplest facts of his biography. He was born in Nagasaki, in 1954. Switch those last two numbers round and his life becomes a very different one. His parents, however, made the war seem distant to him when he was growing up.

'I often play little games in my head,' he says. 'Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, that's 1990 and that seems like yesterday to me.'

Ishiguro talks a lot about the different ways that successive generations, or even people born two or three years apart, experience the world. He has a novelist's fascination in how much of us is shaped, skewered by our particular historical moment.

'I went many years without even associating Nagasaki with the atomic bomb,' he says. 'Then in the 1980s, when there was a new concern about CND and so on, Nagasaki took on this symbolic value. I felt my Nagasaki had been appropriated. It was suddenly this burning city of ashes. For me it was where I lived until the age of five. A beautiful place of mountains and sea, where I can remember whole days and conversations, my nursery school, my house. I recall very clearly when we arrived in Guildford. The shock of that new atmosphere. And now when I look back to the Guildford of that time it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.'

Even at 50 there is a lot that is boyish about Ishiguro in person. He laughs easily, as if the initial fun and oddness of being a Japanese child in the heart of suburban England has never left him. What strikes you about him is his intact enthusiasm for the mystery of the world. He makes you want to imagine his parents.

His father was a world-renowned oceanographer and the British government brought him over to do research. 'Basically,' Ishiguro says, 'he spent most of his career in secret in this facility in the woods in Surrey. It had a lot to do with security. He was inventing this big machine. I still don't know what the machine was. All I remember was that we had a hell of a lot of scrap paper at home. If I ever wrote something and turned the paper over there would be these wave charts on the other side. I used to think when I was in my teens I was very different from my father, but now I see that what we do is probably quite similar.'

The inventions that Ishiguro makes are all intricate versions of the England in his head. 'I don't have a deep link with England like, say, Jonathan Coe or Hanif Kureishi might demonstrate. For me it is like a mythical place.'

For this novel, he says, he used a kind of low-budget film-maker's trick. 'I thought wherever Kathy went in England I would paint it like it was Norfolk on a grey day. It is a good alternative atmosphere for England, an antidote to heritage England or the glittering cities like London or the working-class North.'

He puts his ability to see England in inverted commas down to the fact that he never had an immigrant's sense of attempting to assimilate. Every year his family were planning to go back to Japan; it just never happened. This ingrained unsettledness finds its expression in the deceptively flat surfaces of his language. He has always written, he says, with a sense of translation in mind.

Initially this was to do with the fact that he started to write English fiction with Japanese narrators and had to create the illusion that they were talking in Japanese. But subsequently he has felt that there is a kind of globalised impulse in his sentences. 'I want my words to survive translation,' he says. 'I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write - with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.'

Some of his skill with simplicity is born, too, out of his teenage desire to be a rock star. When he was 15 or so he started writing songs, autobiographical adolescent things. 'I went through my purple-prose phase in my songwriting,' he says. There are some 'slightly Allen Ginsbergy tapes from that period' which he has no intention of sharing. Though he knew the whole jazz repertoire, by the time he reached his early twenties he had got that out of his system and was using only very basic chords and language in his songs. 'I was really writing between the lines. And that was what I took into my fiction. That was my apprenticeship really.'

There is nothing spare in Never Let Me Go, it feels like it has been carefully reduced.

'It's partly to do with the first person voice,' he says, 'but anyway I can't write these marvellous sentences like Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie that crackle with vitality. I do get a great writerly kick out of reading writers at that sentence level, but I suppose I only respect novelists who have a powerful overall vision. I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.'

In his own case, these worlds have got stranger as his work has developed.

In his first three novels he used the device of having an elderly narrator look back on the mistakes of life, the implication being that if you did so you would see an almost clear path. 'I think that was very much a young person's view of life,' he says. 'When I got to 40 or so I realised that was not how we experienced life at all. I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on and many that I had no control over whatsoever.'

This disjuncture was marked by his 'difficult' fourth novel, The Unconsoled, a 600-page demonstration of the comic, disturbing lack of linear progression in a single life. It opened new territory for him and confounded expectations.

After The Remains of the Day, he says, 'I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult that was the time. At least, after the Booker, everyone was prepared to give The Unconsoled a go ... '

It was also, you guess, a way of stepping back from the distractions of his early literary success. 'I had been plunged into a different world,' he says. 'I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.'

He had to remind himself, in a way, that literary culture takes place in the study. 'And,' he says, 'I really had to protect the relationships that were valuable to me. I had been with Lorna since before I was a writer. We met when we were both working for the Cyrenians homeless charity in London. She thought I would be a failed rock'n'roll star and that we would be miserable social workers as we got older, always looking at job ads in the back of the Guardian.' He had no desire to let that go.

In many ways, for all its structural bleakness, the new novel is Ishiguro's most profound statement of the endurance of human relationships.

'I thought, certainly at the planning stage, it was my most cheerful book,' he says, smiling. 'Unless you have a real sense of precious things under threat there would be nothing sad about time being limited. The people in the novel believe, irrationally, like we all believe, that love can do all kinds of things that make you exempt from your fate.'

Set against this belief, though, is a very direct sense of mortality. Given that he measures out his writer's life in five-year periods, I wonder if he feels that particularly strongly.

'I'm only 50 but I certainly feel time is running out for me in an urgent sense,' he says. 'I never forget that Pride and Prejudice was written by someone several years younger than Zadie Smith. War and Peace was written by someone who would easily qualify for the Best of Young Russian Novelists.' He laughs at this idea. 'It is not,' he says, 'that I will not be alive soon - hopefully - but I realise my abilities might not be there beyond a certain age, and I might become like one of these novelists who are treated respectfully for work they did when they were much younger. I don't look forward to that.'

Still, Ishiguro knows, too, that there are exceptions to every rule about writing; that there is nothing certain about fate. And anyway, that on the evidence of Never Let Me Go, the most exact and affecting of his books to date, he does not have to steel himself for the honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards just yet.

Life at a glance
Born: Nagasaki, 1954
Education: BA, University of Kent; MA, University of East Anglia
Married: Lorna MacDougall, 1986
Employment: Grouse-beater for Queen Mother, Balmoral; social worker, west London Cyrenians
First novel: A Pale View of Hills, 1982
Awards: RSL Winifred Holtby Award, 1983, for A Pale View of Hills; Whitbread Book of the Year, 1986, for An Artist of the Floating World; Booker Prize, 1989, for The Remains of the Day; Cheltenham Prize, 1995, for The Unconsoled; Booker shortlist, 2000, for When We Were Orphans
Film adaptations: The Remains of the Day, 1993
Honours: OBE, 1995; Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 1998

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